New Liberalism

Politicians will say anything, I guess, to get elected:

If an election can turn on a sentence, this could be the one: “You don't need papers for voting.”

On Thursday night, Francine Busby, the Democratic candidate for the 50th Congressional District, was speaking before a largely Latino crowd in Escondido when she uttered those words. She said yesterday she simply misspoke.

But someone taped it and a recording began circulating yesterday. After she made that statement at the meeting, Busby immediately said: “You don't need to be a registered voter to help (the campaign).”

I understand the emotion of the immigration debate, and respect that people have a wide range of opinions on the issue, but the bottom line is that all of us - especially government officials - ought to believe that our laws need enforcement. The Democrats have serious issues to work out when it comes to illegal immigration if they can't get a consensus on that very basic point.

In case I am being forgetful, can someone please remind me what the Canadians did to draw the ire of Islamists?

I'm going to be back to posting. It has been too long, and I really miss writing. There is a lot going on these days, and I want to get back to it. I won't be able to post during the day, on account of my job, but I'll try and put some stuff together on a more regular basis. Please keep coming back.

I guess the issue that weighs most heavily on me, and on all of us, is the war in Iraq. Full disclaimer: I'm a supporter. Have been. Will be. My endorsement was never predicated on weapons of mass destruction, although I was certainly concerned about Saddam having some.

As you might be able to tell from the title of the blog, I'm a liberal. I believe in equal rights for all, I believe in human dignity, I believe in the state existing to protect the individual from the majority. There was a time - not all that long ago, I believe - when liberals believed in engaging the world in an end-all-be-all struggle to unseat power anywhere it didn't promote the ideals I just described. And so, when Bush and company started talking openly about overthrowing Saddam, I listened. I haven't agreed with the tactics, or with the planning, or with the lack of planning, but I cannot ingore the quiet nobility of an army of volunteers sacrificing from their own lives, or sacrificing their lives, for the lives of others they have never known and would never know otherwise.

So, when I hear the Democrats speaking of withdrawl I get upset. And I get more upset than I do when I hear Republicans spouting their "follow the leader and ask no questions" nonsense. As far as I'm concerned, the GOP partisans are a lost cause. But the Dems... they're like family, and when I see family going astray I become saddened and angered. This "War on Terror," or whatever it is, is nothing else if not a brilliant opportunity to assert and reassert the principles and ideals that have sustained liberals and liberalism for decades and even centuries. And, instead, we hear Howard Dean speaking of how unwinnable our current fight is, and how we should retreat and focus on our problems hear at home. Whatever those problems are, they pale in comparison to the problems we could be working on elsewhere.

Wow. It has been a while. But I've decided to at least try and start writing again - on a semi-regular basis. I'm busy with work during the day, and like to run at night. I also have a bad, though very profitable, poker habit which more than augments my meager salary and pays my obscene DC bills. So I don't know how much time for this I'll have, but hopefull some. Hopefully enough to keep some people coming back.

No, not in Darfur. In Khartoum. The power sharing agreement signed earlier this year in Kenya between the SPLM and the Government is the most important thing going in the Sudan these days- no matter what you hear from the Darfur-warriors in the United States and Europe. The conflict in Darfur is tragic and offensive and brutal, and, to be sure, there are people who should pay for their part in it, but the Sudan has bigger problems.

If the power-sharing agreement doesn’t stick, you can forget about Darfur because there won’t be a power structure inside the Sudan to resolve the situation. And, despite making overtures in January, the power-brokers inside Khartoum are now showing their true colors:

Sudan’s ruling elite looks unwilling to share power with former southern rebels, despite agreeing to do so in a January peace deal to end Africa’s longest civil war, analysts and diplomats say.

"It seems at the moment that they might be trying to set up a shadow government as advisers inside the presidency," a western diplomat in Khartoum told Reuters. "The signs aren’t good that they are serious about power-sharing."

There can’t be a “shadow government” inside the “real” government. That would wreck any good will that now exists between the “North” and the “South.” The civil war would restart, though it would look like a lot different from the one that began in the mid-1980’s. The Government has all the territory in needs to monopolize the natural resource wealth, and it is unlikely the rebels in the south would be able to take any territory. But one problem the government would have would be the population of southerners who have moved to Khartoum- numbering, by some estimates, 3-4 million. That is a potential 5^th column, and it would have the potential to destabilize the capital- albeit from an encircled position.

So the important thing to do is compel the Sudanese government to honor the pledge it made in January. How? Well, sanctions won’t work because 1) We don’t have much economic leverage in the Sudan and 2) Any divestment strategy would only push Khartoum closer to Beijing, which has already said it doesn’t give a damn about the internal politics of its African gas station. So, if sticks won’t work, we’ll have to use carrots. My biggest suggestion would be offering a thaw in existing trade barriers with the West, and promising economic aid to rebuild the wasted Northern cotton industry in return for more accountability in the peace process and more transparency in the Sudan’s government. This is something that wouldn’t be expensive at all, and could go a long way towards helping a troubled nation build a national trust in Sudanese politics. Additionally, by viewing the United States and the West as contributing to the economic revitalization of the Sudan, the Sudanese people would be less likely to turn to Islamism.

But if you have ideas, by all means let me know in the comments section. The Sudan has been neglected, irresponsibly, by Western governments since the end of the Cold War. Let's get some dialogue going and try and fix that.

George W. Bush, in a somewhat odd admission, went into the White House in 2001 saying he'd model his presidency on Harry Truman's. Odd for someone who campaigned as an isolationist, but whatever.

So, considering Katrina and the feckless response of Chertoff, Michael Brown and the rest of Bush's government, I have one question for President Bush: Where- exactly- does the proverbial "buck" stop?

I never, ever thought I could compare Kofi Annan, the man who covered up the Rwandan genocide so the Western powers wouldn't have to act, favorably to anyone... to anyone. But today is different. Here is Annan's reaction to the report on the UN Oil for Food scandal, which implicates him personally and does not mince words about his failures as UN Secretary General:

Addressing the Security Council along with the report's author, the former Federal Reserve chairman, Paul A. Volcker, Mr. Annan said, "The report is critical of me personally, and I accept the criticism."

He told the 15 members seated around the Council's horseshoe panel that the findings "must be deeply embarrassing to us all; the inquiry committee has ripped away the curtain and shone a harsh light into the most unsightly corners of our organization."

Now think about George W. Bush and Michael "Heckuva job" Brown. Ugh.

What could I possibly add that hasn't been said already, and in 1,000 different places?

That the local and state governments failed monumentally to adequately prepare for and protect their constituents from the devastation everyone predicted Katrina would cause is obvious. Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin will, to be sure, pay dearly for their mistakes the next time they're up for election- if they decide to run again.

That the federal government was caught napping on flat feet is the understatement of our young century. The line out of the White House and from FEMA has been to blame the state and local governments for not doing enough to protect those in harms way, essentially invoking the principle of states rights as an after-the-fact excuse for their own impotence and unpreparedness. What a load of crap. Bush will fly home from vacation in the middle of the night to keep a feeding tube stuck in Terry Schiavo, in the process ignoring 10 years of Florida state court rulings, but he decides that protecting hundreds of thousands of citizens from a Category 4 Hurricane everyone with their head above the sand knew would hit New Orleans directly is an issue worthy of taking a stand for limited government on. Limited indeed.

Is the federal government supposed to be a bloated, budget-running, moralizing force in everyone's lives? Or is it supposed to be a skinny, efficient military force to be deployed only in defense of our borders? Bush seems to be a bit schizophrenic on this question, does he not? I would prefer the federal government, due to its incredible potential to mobilize resources and generate effective results, not be a spectator when it comes to things like major cities flooding with water and 10,000 people drowning. Perhaps Bush feels differently... I don't know how sitting on the sidelines while thousands drown in downtown New Orleans gels with his "compassionate conservatism," but he knows the ideology better than I do.

But why would he, if he believed this wasn't the place of the federal government, create an entire cabinet level government agency to handle such emergencies? And why would he he fill out the budget of this department of Homeland Security if he believed the hypothetical flooding of New Orleans would be the job of the responsibility of the New Orleans Police Department? No, clearly Bush believed that such an agency was important enough to spend elbow over fist on in an era of massive budget defecits that threaten the future of our national economy. Clearly, that fact alone gives you an idea of just how seriously Bush believed it was the federal government's duty and obligation to protect the residents of urban centers in the United States from catastrophe.

So what the heck happened, then? Why the delay in response? Why does the President go on Good Morning America and say that no one predicted the levees would break? Why does Michael Brown go on CNN and say that the federal government didn't know refugees were holed up in the Convention Center until Thursday, even though CNN and other networks had been reporting as much and more about that story for 48 hours? Why did FEMA turn away thousands of bottles of water donated by Walmart? The list goes on.

And you wonder- even though you know it should happen- if anyone will actually lose their job for this. Will Michael Brown, who has shown himself more incompetent than anyone could possibly be at his job at FEMA, be shown the door? If Bush canned him, Bush might be worried that would be viewed (correctly) as evidence of his own government's mishandling of the situation, and one has to wonder if Bush is more concerned with staffing government jobs with competent people or with how history books will come to see him. After all, Donald Rumsfeld, after Abu Ghraib and everything that has gone on in Iraq, and after repeated bipartisan calls for his resignation, still goes to work at the Pentagon every day.

Well, one guarantee I can make. The history books will look at this episode, and frown upon Bush's role in it- whether he fires Brown or not. So he might as well sack up and admit someone on his staff did a bad job at something... his standing in the record books as one of the most inept doofuses to lead a major country won't be affected, but at least he'll be doing something to help out.

No doubt the Administration will continue to claim there are enough American troops in Iraq, and no doubt they will, due to incidents like this one, continue to look foolish doing so.

BAGHDAD, Sept. 5 -- Fighters loyal to militant leader Abu Musab Zarqawi asserted control over the key Iraqi border town of Qaim on Monday, killing U.S. collaborators and enforcing strict Islamic law, according to tribal members, officials, residents and others in the town and nearby villages.

Residents said the foreign-led fighters controlled by Zarqawi, a Jordanian, apparently had been exerting authority in the town, within two miles of the Syrian border, since at least the start of the weekend. A sign posted at an entrance to the town declared, "Welcome to the Islamic Republic of Qaim."

Can you even call this an “occupation” any longer? When we don’t have enough troops to secure the capital, and when insurgent forces and foreign extremists are occupying whole towns, I think one must acknowledge that something is awry. Of course, many of us have been stressing just that for months now, but to no avail.

Qaim is an important foothold for the insurgents, and it amazes me that coalition forces would allow it to be taken. At just two miles from the Syrian border, a Zarqawi controlled Qaim will quickly become the first stop on the Underground Railroad for international jihadists looking to mix it up with US forces in central Iraq. But perhaps even more troubling for those of us who supported this War to rid Iraqis of Saddam-style oppression, is that the Bush Administration wouldn’t supply enough troop-strength to prevent stuff like this from happening:

Witnesses in Qaim said Zarqawi's fighters were killing officials and civilians whom they consider to be allied with the Iraqi and U.S. governments or anti-Islamic. On Sunday, the bullet-riddled body of a young woman dressed in her nightclothes lay in a street of Qaim. A sign left on her corpse declared, "A prostitute who was punished."

Zarqawi's fighters have shot and killed nine men in public executions in the city center since the start of the weekend, accusing the men of being collaborators with U.S. forces, said Sheik Nawaf Mahallawi, a leader of the Albu Mahal, a Sunni Arab tribe that had clashed earlier with the foreign fighters.

What a tragedy, and what an avoidable tragedy. Obviously, hearts go out to the Iraqis who have to deal with the sharp end of Bush’s mind boggling incompetence. But I also have a great amount of sympathy for US troops who have been asked to do an almost impossible task by leaders who refuse to equip them with all the tools they need… including boots on the ground. Still think we have enough troops in Iraq? Read this:

Many of the towns along the river have been subject to domination by foreign-led fighters, despite repeated Marine offensives in the area since May. Residents and Marines have described insurgents escaping ahead of such drives, and returning when the offensives end.

Of course, the insurgents wouldn’t be able to return when the offensives end if there were enough Marines or Army GIs to stay on after the offensives and provide security. But that would be too obvious a concept for Bush to grasp, and too painful a concept for Donald “On the Cheap” Rumsfeld to accept.

At some point, considering the magnitude of this tragedy, you would think someone, at some level of government, would come forward and at least say something like, “There are a lot of people in all levels of government who are responsible, and I am one of them.”

We already know that Nagin is unwilling to take his share of the blame from his angry tirade to CNN radio. He blames Michael D. Brown, the FEMA director, and guess what? Brown blames him!

Governor Kathleen Blanco is placing the blame on the Federal Government, and the Federal Government is blaming everything on Blanco.

Understandably, no one wants to get close to this thing. There is no “upside.” But there used to be a time in this country when elected officials “rose to the occasion” and “seized the moment.” Even recently… I’ll never forget Giuliani walking through the streets of Manhattan holding the NY1 microphone as the Towers burned and collapsed, telling people to remain calm, to stay home, and assuring them things were as under control as they could be given the circumstances. Here was an elected official in charge. It wasn’t that long ago, yet it seems like another lifetime.

Do any of the government officials we've seen on TV lately appear to be exuding that kind of calm, collected and controlled confidence? No. Fire them all.

And just in case there is any doubt as to who "them all" is referring to...

Chertoff
Brown
Nagin
Blanco

Donald Rumsfeld is perhaps the only government official who is blameless in the government's feckless response to Katrina, but that didn’t stop the NY Times from taking a harsh swipe at the Secretary of Defense on their website:

Upon his arrival at the airport, Mr. Rumsfeld spoke to and shook hands with military and rescue officials, but he walked right by a dozen refugees lying on stretchers just feet away from him, most of them extremely sick or handicapped, Reuters reported.

Ouch. Meanwhile, its been almost 7 days since the Katrina came ashore, there has been unprecedented amounts of negative media coverage of the response to the disaster, there have been too many promises by government officials to improve rescue operations than can be counted, and…. and nothing has changed. There still aren’t enough resources in the area.

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- Time is running out for thousands of people awaiting rescue six days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, rescuers say.

Officials say they do not have the manpower, the resources or enough time to save everyone.

"My guys are coming back and telling me, 'Sir, I went into a house, and there are three elderly people in their beds, and they're gasping, and they're dying,' " Coast Guard Capt. Bruce Jones said.

"And we got calls today, 'We need you ... to go to a place in St. Bernard Parish. It's a hospice, ... and there are 10 dead and there are 10 dying.' But those people were probably alive yesterday or the day before."

Though pilots, rescue crew members and maintenance workers are red-eyed and exhausted, they're refusing to rest, CNN's Karl Penhaul reported.

For every person plucked from the flood, there are hundreds still waiting, rescuers say.

"There's simply not enough resources," Jones said.

"It's an awful feeling to know you've not got everybody in time," rescue swimmer Chris Monville said. "You're trying to get everybody out. But in these temperatures the weak and the sick expire first, and it tears at your heart.

Monville said he has rescued 126 people in a single day.

Ugh. More and more, it becomes clear that there will be hell to pay for the government's failure to respond effectively, or even to respond, to this catastrophe. And the disconnect between the administration and reality is troubling. Are they really this clueless? Is that even possible? I guess so.

I don't even know what to add to this. Chertoff should wait for the rescue effort to come to an end, and then he should resign. Or be fired.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Defending the U.S. government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur.

But in fact, government officials, scientists and journalists have warned of such a scenario for years.

Chertoff, fielding questions from reporters, said government officials did not expect both a powerful hurricane and a breach of levees that would flood the city of New Orleans.

"That 'perfect storm' of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight," Chertoff said.

He called the disaster "breathtaking in its surprise."

But engineers say the levees preventing this below-sea-level city from being turned into a swamp were built to withstand only Category 3 hurricanes. And officials have warned for years that a Category 4 could cause the levees to fail.

Read the whole thing.

It begins on 19 October 2005. Mark that day on your calendar as a triumph for Universal Justice. Its a shame that groups like Amnesty International have become so politicized that they won't be able to celebrate Hussein's trial like everyone else, and here is why it is such a shame:

Kubba said seven co-defendants from Saddam's regime would also face trial. They include: Barazan Ibrahim, intelligence chief at the time and Saddam's half brother; former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan; and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, at the time a Baath party official in Dujail, Kubba said.

The eight men will be charged with responsibility for the 1982 massacre of 143 Shiites in Dujail, a town north of Baghdad, after a failed assassination attempt. If found guilty, Saddam could receive the death penalty.

And not a day too soon. Perhaps the saddest thing you can say about the 1982 massacre in Dujail is that it was one of the most unexceptional of Saddam's many crimes. If you have doubts that the United States did the right thing removing Hussein from power, read Samantha Power's A Problem From Hell. A more horrifying picture of Hussein's Iraq has never been painted.

Late last night, I found myself watching Bill Maher. I usually loathe the guy for peddling a kind of liberal analysis not at all unlike Jon Stewart’s for its lack of intellectual strength or its over-abundance of elitist arrogance and condescension, and last night was hardly an exception. But there was one useful segment, and one that I’ll give Maher his share of credit for. He did an interview with Anderson Cooper, who has distinguished himself in the last week perhaps more than any journalist not named Brian Williams, where he spoke about the anger and hostility in the press towards the government officials who have clearly not lived up to their jobs.

In the interests of “objectivity,” journalists have by and large become lazy. They report on a story by running quotes by people holding opposing views and filling in the rest of the space with some basic details. And with a press that is too sensitive to charges of bias to actually pursue a bottom-line truth, the government has in turn made itself less transparent and more self-congratulatory. Bush, elected by the people, rarely if ever takes questions, and has done fewer interviews/press-conference than any other President in recent history. And with the media being driven by advertising sales and ratings/subscriptions, and with news consumers more interested in Michael Jackson’s foibles, not much was changing.

But the anger we’re seeing in the press towards the bankruptcy of the government’s response to Katrina, perhaps, will refocus the reporters on what their jobs actually are: getting the truth. It sounds corny and cliché, but it is no less the case. One of the reasons I started this site was to raise the level of debate in political discourse [I know I’ll have next to no impact, but at least I’ll be able to say I did my small part]. The black and white boilerplate that has been followed for so long (again, so as not to be accused of bias) has watered everything down.

“Bias” shouldn’t be something we should be afraid of- conservative or liberal. Christopher Hitchens, who lately has disappointed with his descent into “White House Operative” status by going at Cindy Sheehan with a freshly sharpened hatchet and defending Bush in The Weekly Standard, snapped out of it a couple weeks ago to write a column suggesting taking Bush up on his word of teaching Intelligent Design alongside evolution in school science classes [how could reasonable people in the post-Enlightenment age living in the United States, when given a choice between science and superstition, choose superstition?]. If we have a free-marketplace of ideas, where serious liberal critiques and serious conservative critiques are allowed to compete fairly against all other critiques, then you’ll see the best opinions achieve the most prominence and, I think, you’ll also see a moderation in politics. Political extremism- left or right- is bad in the United States just as it is bad everywhere else. And extremism typically comes from an ideologically selective interpretation of “the facts.” So let’s hope the press remembers how to find out what those facts are, and remembers how to complete a serious analysis of them, and remembers how to draw conclusions from those analyses. Let’s hope they remember soon that their jobs require them to actually do work.

If there is an area I can provide more than a pedestrian analysis about, it is The Sudan. I have been researching this topic for over a year, and not in casual way: 60+ books, countless journal articles, every Economist article since 1985, etc. It is a topic I came to care about through my research, and it is very difficult for me to tolerate the coverage the media typically gives it.

My opinions are going to chafe the conventional wisdom. Darfur- for all its horrors- is not a “genocide,” nor has it ever been. It would be only an issue of semantics if an understanding of the true nature of the conflict in The Sudan’s western region wasn’t so essential to crafting a solution to it. Even more important than Darfur, though, is the peace process that began earlier this year with the signing of the Naivasha Protocol, officially ending the 23 year old civil.

As news develops from The Sudan, I’ll link to it and discuss it. I’ll do my part to help people understand what is going on over there without the pointless and irrelevant religious and racial stereotypes assigned by an ignorant American press.

Things are not going well, I'm sad to say. We are approaching a real tipping point, too. We went there to rid the land of Saddam and to promote liberalism in a unitary state. Yet, in our desire to be hands off in the Constitutional process, we have allowed liberalism to be imperiled, and we have allowed the three main factions in Iraq to grow even farther apart.

I'm sure I'll write more on this topic in the future, but it seems almost pointless to focus on the Constitution when the insurgency is raging around the entire country. Security, then liberty, then democracy. That has always been the order of things in the past- in North America, in Germany and Japan and so forth. Why we allowed this process to go forward in Iraq without dealing properly with security is beyond me. If anyone has the President's ear, ask him.

The President's words that should be giving people the most heartburn are the ones he used to end his press conference:

“It -- for those who have not -- trying to conceive what we're talking about, it's as if the entire Gulf Coast were obliterated by a -- the worst kind of weapon you can imagine. And now we're going to go try to comfort people in that part of the world.”

Precisely. The damage in New Orleans is not all that different from what a catastrophic terrorist attack on the city would have looked like. What if a bomb had blown up the levees and the city had filled with water in a moment’s notice? Would the response have been this incoherent? Didn’t we, after 11 September 2001, create an entire department of government precisely for responding to terrorist attacks both in terms of prevention and response? Remember, in 2002, FEMA was rolled into Homeland Security. Which begs the question: What on earth have people in Homeland Security been doing for the last 2 years?

To be fair, the same question should be posed to the leaders of every major city in the United States, and to every governor. After 9/11, it would have been inexcusable for city and state governments not to study evacuation plans for their major cities. And yet that is what happened, apparently, in New Orleans. But the Federal Government didn’t do any better, and heads are going to need to roll. Make no mistake: we have given our government extraordinary resources and authorized extraordinary powers in the last few years to deal with scenarios just like this one, and our government has failed us completely.

“The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch. (Laughter).” President Bush.

This quote has been pretty widely circulated and pilloried- for good reason mind you. Obviously, its in poor taste. It’s a little early to be talking about “good news” in the Gulf Coast, and if anyone should be broaching the subject it is not the President who many people are blaming for the total failure of government and the complete breakdown of society within the New Orleans city limits.

Some people have used this statement as evidence of Bush’s indifference to the suffering going on in the wake of Katrina. I’m not sure that’s fair, but there is quite a lot to be concerned about in his words. I think it shows a lack of understanding, and a lack of an ability to strike the right tone or the right balance in a time of national crisis and mourning, which shows he doesn’t quite understand the primacy of his role in all of this. He doesn’t understand why people are directing so much of the criticism at him and his administration, because if he did he wouldn’t be making jokes about Trent Lott’s porch.

So Bush will get to make a second nomination to the Supreme Court, albeit with even less political capital than he had when he nominated John Roberts. That would suggest we’ll see another not-so-nuts nominee, like Roberts, which would be a good thing. Suggestions aside, though, the type of nominee Bush chooses to succeed Rhenquist will shine a very bright light on the state of panic within the White House. Many in the Holy-Wing of the GOP were not all-that-thrilled with Roberts, even though he's said he'd recuse himself if a conflict between the law and his Faith ever appeared before him while on the court (I suppose they would have wanted him to ignore the Constitution and give preference to their Constitution- the one that isn't a living, breathing document). Justices take oathes to uphold the Constitution... taking the day off when it might offend God not to is a dereliction of that duty, and hardly a sign of a prudent jurist. If Bush makes a conservative nomination, then I think the shit will hit the fan. A lot of moderate Republicans who are up for election in 2006 are going to want to get as far away from President Bush as they possibly can, and opposing an ultra-conservative nominee would be a good place to start. The Dems are, frankly, going to want to show nothing but righteous anger at the President for the next year to stave off primary challenges and shore up their elections. But the President has never cared particularly much for public opinion, so if does end up making a moderate nominee, I think we'll all know that its finally hit home for him, and I think we'll all know the White House is very concerned about the state of affairs.

But Liberals need to remember that we don’t get to make this appointment, so the smart thing to hope for a secular constructionist nominee, and not look too foolish in the questioning process.